I was lucky - and honoured - to be a judge on the last IGEN LED challenge which was organised by Naomi Price (she's in the video). Some of the projects I judged are here, some are not familiar so are maybe from other years, but the level of commitment and innovations shown by some of these kids was outstanding. It was VERY difficult to pick a winner, only made slightly easier by the fact that there were several categories to award in.

I have a hand-drawn schematic of a small project I have been working on in front of me now (it's been waiting for me to do a nice one and design a PCB for weeks now) and it is not much different from some of the ones shown. Ya gotta start somewhere with everything.....

But a search on IGEN does not uncover much on this site, apart from the above video. Has it been canned, along with the people who ran it? There are lots of articles about STEM education and teaching on the site, surely EETimes should be at the forefront of encouraging kids to take up engineering in this way? If it gets going again I'd be happy to give some of my non-existent spare time to helping with it.

The fact that these were done by teams does make them vey impressive indeed. And the Edison Engineers keeping a good lab notebook, and realizing what collaboration really consists of, is a very big lesson indeed. So this was an excellent learning project for all of the teams. Better than the university team that did a project for my company a few years back. And I don't think the materials were that very expensive, so it is something that can be done again and again.

And hopefully the exposure to actual engineering, and building a project that works, will encourage some to persue an engineering career.

If anyone is interested in the build instructions for any of these projects, we have most of the detail - reply to me here and let me know which project(s) you are interested in. They would be fun projects for the Fall season leading up to the holidays.

I actually enjoyed every slide and video shown here! Each demo comes with an initial sensation and pride: "Look, what we've done!" I loved the Les Paul guitar thing (image 4). But of course now that I live in Wisconsin, obviously, Lambeau Field demo gets my vote.

I once had an intership at the California State Fair media relations office. I can say for sure there was no electronics section then. Not sure about now, but I kind of doubt it. But I agree with your sentiment. The fact that they did something to represent their area is fair-esque.

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